Interview Feature with CX Quest
Imagine reaching out to customer support in 2025: an AI-driven chatbot greets you instantly, but it fails to understand the nuance of your frustration. Minutes later, a live agent steps in, armed with the entire context of your journey—your last purchase, your feedback trail, and the product issue you described hours ago on social media. The transition feels seamless. You’re understood, not just responded to. That’s the difference between automation with empathy and efficiency without care—an evolution that defines modern customer experience. Yes, we are talking about MVP to MVX.
For Prashanth Krishnaswami (PVK), Head of Marketing Strategy for the CX Group at Zoho, this transformation from the minimum viable product (MVP) to the minimum viable experience (MVX) represents a larger truth: customer experience is no longer an afterthought; it’s the product itself. Backed by over 15 years in product and marketing leadership, Prashanth helps global enterprises architect CX strategies that align technology’s promise with human values. His work embodies CXQuest’s core principle—turning every touchpoint into a moment of clarity, connection, and confidence.
In this conversation, Prashanth explores how organizations can redefine value in CX through unified data, empathetic automation, and the power of thoughtful personalization.
Q1. PVK, you’ve spent over 15 years in product marketing, and you’ve witnessed the customer service landscape evolve dramatically. When you look at the current state of customer experience in 2025, what stands out as the most significant shift from your early career days?
Prashanth Krishnaswami:
The biggest shift I can see is the evolution from MVP to MVX. At the beginning of my career, the minimum viable product was one that solved some aspect of the problem statement. It had a lot of rough edges, it had more things it didn’t do than the things it did. The user experience was nowhere near smooth. It was meant for the nerds and the early adopters who would overwhelmingly try experimental technology and approaches.
Today, the minimum viable experience includes the first experience (onboarding, unboxing), a full customer journey for a small part of the problem statement, plenty of user education content, a community space for early enthusiasts, some triggers for vitality and feedback, and so on. Unlike an MVP, which was a crude hacked-together version of a formidable product/offering, the MVX candidate is a well-rounded small product/offering. A good MVX is pure cross-functional excellence in the simplest form.
Q2. We’re seeing 61% of CX leaders deploying AI-powered proactive communications today. Yet many organizations are struggling with the balance between automation and human touch. How do you help your clients navigate this tension between efficiency and empathy?
Prashanth Krishnaswami:
Our approach has always been that AI can help every role. All of us have parts of our roles that are unfortunately manual and repetitive, and don’t teach us any craftsmanship. An example of that is verifying whether an application form has been filled or not. There are also things that we as humans can either not do at all or not do well enough. An example of that is translating a customer’s call in real-time from one language to another.
Forcing humans into these activities not only creates friction in the employee experience but also leaves open plenty of scope for human error and non-compliance risks. AI has a hierarchy and the higher up you go, the more streamlined your data needs to be. I usually recommend that organizations start small by introducing AI to reduce friction in each role. As they see more success, they gain clarity and a sense of purpose, and that can lead to more impactful expansion in the future.
Q3. Data fragmentation seems to be a persistent challenge for many enterprises. You’ve mentioned that unified customer data is critical for delivering personalized experiences. Walk us through how organizations should approach data unification across multiple channels—what’s the practical roadmap?
Prashanth Krishnaswami:
The primary challenge is indeed fragmentation. Thanks to years of choosing best-of-breed tools for narrow use cases, the entire customer journey is now powered by many dozens of tools. Many touchpoints each collect the data they need to move the customer journey forward from there. Quite a few of them collect the same data. Not all of them collect data within the scope the customer consented to. Some of these touchpoints don’t sync data to any other touchpoint or the master data system. Collectively, all of these circumstances ensure that true personalisation is never possible. Data is either absent in parts or outdated or comes from unreliable sources.
One model that is working well in our observation is to designate a few “hubs” throughout the customer journey and ensure that all the data in the journey syncs to an adjacent hub. Some examples of hubs are marketing automation software, customer service software, and partner management software. Subsequently, it’s simpler to do data reconciliation across a handful of hubs and into a master data source like a CRM or an ERP, or even just an internal database system. This reduces the risk of data contamination and of creating a single point of failure. This approach also makes it simpler to manage a mature compliance posture.
Q4. In your role, you interact with CX leaders across diverse industries. What are you hearing about the ROI expectations for CX initiatives? How are they measuring success beyond traditional metrics like CSAT and NPS?
Prashanth Krishnaswami:
CSAT and NPS are broad indicators of customer experience quality, and there are other metrics to connect CX to revenue. Adoption and attrition are good indicators of the primary business impact of customer experience. Net customer churn, customer lifecycle duration, and net dollar retention are also useful for correlation with CSAT and NPS. On the B2C side, it’s helpful to correlate CSAT and NPS with cross-sale and repeat purchases.
Q5. Hyper-personalization is the buzzword of 2025, but execution remains elusive for many. What specific CX strategies or Zoho capabilities are helping enterprises move from generic customer journeys to truly individualized experiences at scale?
Prashanth Krishnaswami:
We’re all definitely moving from narrow segments to segments-of-one. Different organizations are in different places on that quest based on their strengths and market dynamics. There are some good habits here. Organizations have to move beyond optimizing for efficiency in each touchpoint and start considering the entire customer journey as a whole. This helps them understand where the return is maximized on personalization investments. Customers also don’t care about everything being hyper-personalised.
Some experiences are clearly more important to them than others. It’s important to get that priority right. Another good habit is around data management. It’s a good thumb rule to collect data at a point that’s unavoidable or that’s closest to customer value. When customers see the value between their data and their experiences, they begin to trust the brand more over time. If you’re collecting their date of birth just to send a birthday greeting, then you’re doing personalization wrong.
MVP to MVX: Today’s CX is Built on Cross-functional Craftsmanship
As we wrap up this powerful discussion with Prashanth Krishnaswami, one idea echoes strongly—CX excellence today isn’t built on flashy tools or buzzwords, but on cross-functional craftsmanship. The move from MVP to MVX redefines success as experience-first innovation, where technology enables, not eclipses, human empathy.
A few threads stand out:
- AI as an enabler, not a replacement—used to remove friction, not human connection.
- Unified data as trust’s backbone, bridging silos without breaching consent.
- Personalization with purpose, driven by customer value, not vanity gestures.
- Metrics that matter, linking CX to retention, loyalty, and advocacy—not just surveys.
Prashanth’s perspective reinforces a truth every CX leader must internalize: in 2025, experience is strategy.
Dive deeper into emerging CX insights via the CXQuest AI in CX Hub, explore frameworks in CX Leadership, and catch more expert conversations shaping the next generation of intelligent, human-centered experiences.
Because in the end—CX isn’t managed; it’s mastered through mindset.
